Three Ways Anyone Can Preserve Their Cherished Memories Forever

We are the product of our experiences. Those we have shared with family, teachers, friends, colleagues & perfect strangers. The good, the bad and the ugly all rolled into one lifetime; all we’ve done and learned along the way. Our memories are so precious for that reason. What follows are our top suggestions to keep those memories alive so you can relive and enjoy them.

Get creative!

We love creating with our hands. Generally, these creations have a high failure rate, but that is part of the fun, right? In fact, if you want to laugh along with other crafters, check out this site. Well if getting creative and and little sticky is up your alley, we have a few projects to keep your memories alive.

Making a mini (read – adorable) matchstick album for special days, get togethers or holidays. If you have an Instax or other instant camera, you are all set. If not, a simple extra step of ordering prints from your favourite print shop. Some glue, a marker and some simple craft paper mini albums and you will have shoe boxes full of short, visual, tactile memories to bring out from under the bed on a rainy day.

Get your hands on a laser! Yup. A laser. Maker Labs have courses to teach you to use their laser cutter. Using vector designs (they have classes for that too), you can etch or cut your design out of leather, wood or metal. Do this with your wedding logo, a special photo, or a family motto. Did we mention that you get to operate a laser?!

If getting your hands dirty isn’t for you, why not work with a local artist and have them sketch, paint or ink a place of significance for you? We spotted local artist @ManonGarritsen sketches of buildings on Twitter and loved this idea as an anniversary gift. Hang it on your wall or print it on a pillow.

Of course, there are hundreds of ways to preserve memories with craft. We’ve shared these ones as we love lasers, pillow fights and treasures tucked under the bed. We’d love to hear your favourites.

Create your own website to hold your memories for you

If you are even a little tech savvy, the ultimate way to keep your memories alive is to create a website dedicated to them. You can create the website, write your own stories, upload your photos and videos plus you can share easily with whomever you wish.

Our co-founder Jen and her husband Simon did this for their wedding and used it to tell the story of their ten years together. They shared travel information, fun photos and even had a page that was dedicated to photos uploaded to social media by their friends who used their wedding hashtag.

With all sorts of website building sites out there, you don’t need to have special training to be good at this! There are many free and pay website builders out there; Wix, Strikingly andSquarespace to name a few.

Having your own website allows you not only to immortalize your important, goofy, fun memories, but also to share them easily with family & friends.

Get your digital files organized!

Yeah, we know, this is probably sounds less fun than a trip to the dentist (sorry to all the amazing dentists out there ;). But organization is the key to enjoyment of your hundreds (and thousands?) of photo and video files.

Remember when you would have to be choosy about the photos and video you took because you were using film? The benefit of photography now is that you can shoot, re-shoot and shoot again until you get that perfect shot. The downside is that you have thousands of photos of the same thing from slightly different angles, lighting and quality stored on an SD card, your phone or your computer. With a bit of organization, that number could easily be cut in half freeing up space and maximizing enjoyment.

You have a couple of options when it comes to consolidating and storing your digital memories. To keep things clear, let’s assume that you have average storage needs of somewhere between 100 to 500GB of storage space.

Psst. If you have some old VHS tapes sitting around, we’ve got you! Check out our blog for 2 ways to convert your VHS tapes into current, useable digital files.

Hard Drive

A hard drive is an option to backup your photos if you will be disciplined enough to budget for a replacement between its third and fourth year. Studies show that besides random ‘lemon’ and ‘factory defect’ failures, the failure rate of hard drives is minimal in the first 35 months, but skyrockets after 36 months.

The great thing about external hard drive storage is that they are simple, you incur one cost per three years and you have lots of choices. Don’t get bogged down in the details however. Just make sure that is compatible with your computer and has enough storage for your media.

Cloud storage

We love the cloud option mainly because we can access our media files on the go and cloud systems allow beautiful viewing options for your photos. Services like Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and more exist for the express purpose of storing your stuff. All services give you at least a little free storage to play around with to see if you like it. You can find a great comparison of cloud storage systems here.

Essentially, many options exist for both free and pay services. How much you pay is dependant mostly on your total size of files. If you are anything like us, you will pay more to start, but after you start going through your photos and videos, you will pair down and need smaller storage size.

Here at Clipsake, we use both Dropbox and Google drive for our various business documents. For us, Google drive is the hands down winner as our photo cloud storage because of its useful search function and beautiful way it displays our photos.

So say you want to find that picture of you and your best friend that time you went surfing in Australia. Just type the word ‘beach’ or ‘Cottesloe’ into the search bar. Yeah, it is that easy.

Or maybe you are creating a family photo album and want to see all of your photos of Aunt Mildred. Simple, search the ‘people’ function, assign a name to the face of Aunt Mildred (all listed as icons) and Google Photos will find all photos of Aunt Mildred. In this way, accessing your memories is a breeze. You can upload photos and videos into folders and rename them to make them photo albums. That way they’re safely stored in the cloud and they’re organized!

So there you have it. 3 ways you can take what were once a big pile of random digital files and transform them into evenings of enjoyment, gifts for family, beautiful decor and video keepsakes. Here’s hoping we’ve made organizing and editing sexy enough that you grab your computer and get started! Whether you make a family photo wall, create albums for your family, or get in touch with us to make your random video clips into shareable video keepsakes we hope you have an awesome Autumn (and blow up at least one awkward photo of a sibling to stuff in their stocking this Christmas!)

Editor’s Note: This post by our friends at Clipsake, a local business doing some cool stuff helping you save memories and DIY video. This is not a paid placement: they’re just cool people I asked to write about memory preserving.